Of all the things I need to do, watching Neil deGrasse Tyson lectures doesn’t seem to be super important. Yet here I am doing exactly that. I have game play footage to edit(2 months since an upload now I think), 4 days since I’ve done a vlog, I have more training tomorrow that I’m supposed to practice for, but no, here I sit. I justify it with the simple fact that It’s awesome.

Fast forward about 16 hours and I didn’t practice at all for my thing today. I did well though, so no worries there. I’m still thinking about the universe. That’s the beauty of being. The beauty of existing is the ability to contemplate existence. Is it not? Man. that’s some deep stuff right there. It goes to that quote. “I think therefore I am” ~ Rene Descartes. or something along those lines. Regardless I’ve been fascinated as of late. So many wonderfully impossible concepts to perceive.

So I have an okay understanding of a multitude of scientific fields. Astronomy is no exception. I’ve read a great many books and watched a large amount of lectures. Now It’s all practical based conversational knowledge. I mean I don’t understand the math behind most of it. That doesn’t matter so much, let others do the major legwork and allow me to simply ponder based on the information they provide.

So this is my current quandary. (I’m going to state some things as factual, whether they are or not I don’t know). The universe is expanding. Galaxies are more redshifted the farther they are away. The speed of light is constant(within a vacuum). The rate of expansion is 22km/s/Mly which is kilometers per second for every million light years. The universe is 14ish billion years old…. Ok, so this is where I start to have issues. The light reaching Earth from the farthest observed object is 13.3ish billion years old as it has traveled that same distance to reach us…. or has it?

The light we see from this galaxy is of a 420 million year old celestial object. Estimating it’s inception to be at the time universal expansion. Sooo.. How far away was it from us then? The rapid expansion of the universe following the big bang would allow objects to already be incredibly distances from each other at that point. Lets imagine that this object was 420 million light years away(just because, get over it) that means at that point it would be receding at 9240km/s… speed of light  is 300,000km/s. OK so if the light were to travel unimpeded it would reach our point in 420 million years. BUT! it’s year 13.7ish billion right? so some how this light took 12.88 billion years too long to reach here(assuming it was 420 mly away, which is roughtly half the maximum. ok ok so I messed up some math. Lets see if I can complicate it enough but still solve it.(this is my real time thought process by the way)

The light leaves the object at 300,000km/s it is redshifted as as result of the cosmological expansion. Ok I lost my train of thought. Basically what I’m saying is. yes, this object was at that point 13.3 billion years ago, but it is not there anymore. We hear it all the time, but stars we see may have already gone supernova and we won’t see it for years or millions of years. That protogalaxy is not there anymore, it is somewhere else. going back to the equation earlier. the distance at which the rate of expansion exceeds the speed of light is 13.3636363636363636364(it keeps going) billion light years away. Which is the edge of our observable universe. It doesn’t mean things are out there. It’s also weird to think that something can travel faster than light, but it’s not. or is it? this is where I’d really like to have Neil Or Michio to chat with.

I’m going to go get a beer and watch some football. My brain needs a little rest.

Crash and Burn

Casey